Neapolitan Ice Cream
by The Chthonic Professor
Summary: Three best friends are reborn into the Naruto world. Yeah, I know, it sounds like the punchline of a bad joke, but that's what happened. I'm Uzumaki-Kaguya Notokami, he's Akimichi Fudo, and she's Ikkasei, bastard child of Jiraiya of the Sannin and a whore. Who are we? We're Konoha's infamous Team Three. M for swearing and violence.


**_Neapolitan Ice Cream_**

 ** _The Chthonic Professor_**

 ** _Summary:_** _Three best friends are reborn into the Naruto world. Yeah, I know, it sounds like the punchline of a bad joke, but that's what happened. I'm Uzumaki-Kaguya Notokami, he's Akimichi Fudo, and she's Ikkasei, bastard child of Jiraiya of the Sannin and a whore. Who are we? We're Konoha's infamous Team Three._

-.-

 ** _Prologue - How To Save A Life_** _(The Fray)_

-.-

There were a combination of factors that explained how I found myself in my current situation.

First and foremost? My death. My death was nothing more and nothing less than chaotic. In my previous life, because it was my previous life, I'd been relatively normal. I lived on a planet called Earth, a perfectly normal planet with perfectly normal problems. I was diagnosed with diabetes at the tender age of only ten months, and lived with it for the rest of my nineteen years of life. I was born to a normal Italian family, ended up with two younger siblings, and had two perfectly normal best friends. I lived my life. Then I died.

It wasn't a spectacular death. It was chaotic, but it wasn't spectacular. I'd died with my friends beside me. We were nineteen, almost twenty at the time. Being the adventurous people we are, the three of us had been saving up to go on a road trip for _years_ , and our dreams were finally coming to fruition. Of course, being the moronic youths we still technically were, we decided to do some touring around Detroit. As people who were clearly, _obviously_ tourists.

We got mugged. I got shot. He got stabbed, twice. She got her head smashed in by a baseball bat, poor thing. So, after living a wholly unimpressive life, the three of us died side-by-side in a dark, dirty Detroit alleyway.

Now, I'm sure you have some questions. Why were we in Detroit? Why did we get mugged? Why would getting mugged lead to our deaths? None of those questions are important. No, the important question is this; why am I referring to my best friends as 'he' and 'she' rather than, oh, I don't know, by _name_. Well, there's a perfectly logical answer to your question.

I don't remember their names.

Again, yes, I know. That makes me sound like an asshole. Thing is, I don't remember my _own_ name either. Heck, I don't even remember what any of us _looked_ like. All I can remember are facts. It's… weird, to say the least. I can remember all of my favourite songs, from the guitar chords, to the drum beats to the lyrics. I can remember a thousand useless facts about Harry Potter, and I can remember every race, class, skill and feat in my Pathfinder Core Rulebook.

Yet, for the life of me, I can't remember what my mother looked like. When I finally realized this…. it hurt. More than anyone, I'd loved my mother to pieces. I think it's something all Italian boys have in common. She was my hero, through and through, and to suddenly be unable to recall her smile or her laugh no matter how hard I tried… well, it was a definite downer.

On top of the way we died, there's a second thing that will help describe the current situation I find myself in; the events that transpired _after_ I died.

So there I was, lying on the pavement with a bullet in my skull. I'm thinking to myself, _'Well, that's one heck of a shitty way to get yourself killed'._ My world blacks out, and suddenly I'm standing alone in a black expanse of total utter nothing-ness. I remember thinking this was some pretty cliche shit to suddenly experience after dying, when _he_ pops up beside me looking just as bewildered as me. I remember him opening his mouth to say something, when _she_ pops up out of nowhere, right in between the two of us.

That's when things started to _really_ get crazy. Some guy who's features I can't remember popped up before us. The guy started going on and on about how one of the Gods got drunk and fucked something up, talking about how they'd decided to create an entirely new world based on the brainchild of a mortal man. He was complaining about how, because that person was his superior, it was dumped on him to fix the problem. The problem? An event would happen in this world that had the potential to usurp the balance of power within the many great beings of the Multiverse, so now we had to stop it. He told us he'd taken a glance through our lives, deemed we were sufficient enough to help fix the problem, and that now it was _our_ problem.

What did we get out of it? We were being reborn, so we had a second chance to live our lives. Honestly I didn't think this was such an insufficient bonus, as we hadn't exactly lived very much life in our last lives, but then he dumped the stipulations on us.

He couldn't exactly stick us somewhere in this new world, he could only make sure we'd be born at the same time we'd been born in this world. That meant whoever managed to conceive us at just the right time, that's who we'd be born to, no matter who they were or where they were. So, we had to come up with a way to find each other in a world where we didn't know our previous names, our previous looks, what we'd look like in this new world, or where we'd be born.

Of course, it ended up being me who came up with the answer.

"Well," I'd said, after a moment of back-and-forth between the three of us, "Why don't we come up with a phrase and a response, one that nobody else would be able to answer properly? Something that has to do with our old world, and that only the three of us would understand."

They agreed because, all in all, it wasn't such a bad idea.

So, this is what I came up with. I thought it was genius, but then again, I've always been one for the dramatics.

"Why don't we use something like this? Whenever we meet someone we think might be one of the three of us, we say something like 'You know, I've always wanted to travel the Multiverse? Then, the response from the other person would have to be 'Well you're in luck, you've just met someone who already has.' Eh? What do you think?"

He, of course, thought it was a stupid idea. She, however, was on board.

"Honestly, it's a pretty good idea. I doubt anybody else can claim to have traveled the Multiverse, so nobody's going to give a positive answer to a question like than. And anyway, if you're still skeptical about it, just make a Magic: The Gathering joke. Y'know, because that's got to do with the Multiverse, and all."

Thus, it was decided. We would use the Multiverse line around people who seemed familiar to us, and only if we got back the proper response would we know we'd met another of the three of us.

With that decided, the God who'd shown up to give us our little explanation finished up with a little speech about not-fucking-up, and sent us on our way.

If I ever met the guy again, I needed to remind myself to give him a firm kick in the gonads. After everything he told us, he forgot to mention that being reborn as a baby sucked _loads_ of ass.

Mainly because of the fact that _I was a baby_. I'd taken a developmental psychology class in college, and let me tell you, babies aren't very aware of anything going on around them for a good little while, at least.

That, more than anything, was the final reason for me being in this current situation.

It was like waking up from a dream, or watching a fog clear away from your vision. All of a sudden, everything was clear. Maybe it was the trauma of the situation, I'm not sure. Even to this day, I don't know what it was that caused me to finally snap into full-awareness.

Either way, one moment I was living life like any other three year old child, and the next I'm staring at my mother's corpse and I'm _aware_. I _understand_. My memories of my new life are wild and foggy. They're hard to grasp, like grains of sand slipping through my fingers, but they're _there_.

I remember, briefly, a man with white hair and a stern face. I remember living alone with my mother, a beautiful young woman barely out of her teens with long, flowing red hair. I remember learning to read and laugh and play, but more than anything, I remember learning to _write_. I remember because the way my mother taught me to write is unlike anything I've ever seen before, and yet, it makes so much _sense_ to my little, three-year-old mind. Only now, as I'm waking up from my fog-like memories into full-awareness, do I understand.

The red hair. The special writing. Though I don't remember ever hearing the name mentioned, my mother was an Uzumaki, and she taught me seals. I finally understood just, exactly, where I was. My friends and I? Yeah, we'd been reborn in the Elemental Nations. This was Naruto's world, and we're supposed to fix it.

Up until now, we'd lived a peaceful life, though a relatively poor one. All my mother ever really spent money on was paper, ink and food. Yet, when I thought about it, something must have gone wrong. She must have slipped up. Someone caught on, because now I was huddling beneath the floorboards clutching a large scroll to my chest, and my mother was dead.

My mother was the only one who ever left the house. She would do all of the shopping, trusting me to take care of myself during those brief moments where I was alone. Though I hadn't understood it then, I did now. She'd been protecting me. Protecting me from this, from the fate she must have known would be coming for her.

These men, these assassins; they knew nothing about me. To them, I didn't exist. This Uzumaki woman they'd killed had been alone these last few years, hiding from her pursuers. She hadn't been raising a child as a single parent. So while I hid below the floorboards, my mother's freshly-spilled blood dripping through the cracks and soaking into my hair, the assassins who'd slit her throat congratulated themselves on a job well done, picked up, and left.

Of course, I hadn't counted on them setting fire to the house in order to rid the place of any incriminating evidence. I'd planned on staying down there for another couple of hours, until I was sure they were well and truly gone and wouldn't be coming back. Now that they'd set fire to the house, my priorities had changed. There was just one problem.

My mother'd died right on top of the loos floorboards, and I was three years old. I wasn't strong enough to lift her off of them and make my escape. I pushed and prodded and heaved, but I just couldn't get her to budge. The small area down here was growing uncomfortably hot, and eventually, I had to move away from the opening and towards the far corner of the house to keep away from the flames.

Slowly, I watched as the fire consumed my mother's corpse, and inched along the floor until there was an inferno raging directly above me. I was panicking by now. I was trapped down here with no way to get out, and it looked like I would be burning to death. I'd finally grown aware of my surroundings and was in complete control of myself, but by the looks of things, I'd be consumed by the flames before I could do anything about it.

That just wasn't fair. I know it sounds like I'm whining, but what kind of shit-luck do I have, anyway?

I heard a sharp _crack_ echo through the small space beneath the house and I knew the whole thing would be coming down soon. With tears streaming down my cheeks, I turned my senses inwards and began digging. I dug deep, reaching for something I knew, I _knew_ , had to be there. It felt like forever, and yet like no time at all when I finally found it. With my eyes clenched tight, I could almost envision it as a blue ball of energy, whirling and twirling about as it rested in my navel. I reached out to grasp it. When I was finally sure I had a good hold on the roiling mass of energy, I _tugged_.

The house came down around me in a shower of sparks.

-.-

When I finally came-to, it was night. The moon was hanging, full and high in the sky, illuminating the now-empty clearing. I rose from the ashes of my home, my mother's scroll still clutched tightly to my chest.

I watched in awe as bone - hard as steel - faded back into peach-coloured skin, and I understood. The vague memories of a man with white hair? That man must have been my father, and a Kaguya to boot.

My mother was dead. I was homeless, an orphan in the middle of the Land of Water, without a roof over my head or a penny to my name. Yet, standing there in the ashes of my home, aware and alive, rising like a phoenix from the ashes, I began to laugh. It looked like the famous Uzumaki luck ran thick in my blood.

To think I'd be born an Uzumaki chakra-monster with one of the strongest bloodlines in the world: the Shikotsumyaku. I almost couldn't believe it. If I hadn't been planning to already, I would've had no choice to become a shinobi after a revelation like this. This was the beginning of something incredible, a true legend in the making.

Now all I had to do was figure out how to get to Konoha from here.


End file.
